Prepare to Publish: Your three month, sure-fire guide to turning your book idea into a book outline is here!

Body Shaming, Being “Fat” and What A Woman Really Wants

A friend of mine recently found a fake Instagram account that had been started with the sole purpose of making fun of her body. This friend is young, beautiful and probably one of the kindest people you’ve ever met—which isn’t so important to the story, except to point out that even young, beautiful women can’t live up to the impossible standards set by culture.

If you’re a woman, you know this to be true and you know how deep the wounds of these comments go—even if they have zero grounding in reality.

And they just keep coming.

The world as it is has very little use for your womanhood. You are considered a weaker sex and are treated as a sexual object. You are thoroughly dispensable, except for bearing children. Your youth is the measure of your worth, and your age is the measure of your worthlessness. Do not look to the world for your sustenance or for your identity because you will not find them there. The world despises you. God adores you.

The hard truth is women today face constant and impossible expectations coming at us from every direction. Magazines. Television. The porn industry. Billboards. Not to mention other women and men who have been indoctrinated by the same culture we have.

We think we want to be skinny, that this would solve all of our problems. But this is not what we really want. Men don’t want “skinny” women and women don’t actually want to be skinny.

We’ve been fooled to believe this is what we want.

Holding onto this belief is disconnecting us from ourselves, from our Truth, from our source of our vitality and energy and life.

Whether or not this develops into a full-blown Eating Disorder is a bit difficult to pin down, since eating disorders happen on a spectrum, and since what might be considered “disordered eating” to one person might seem culturally normal to another (a latte for lunch anyone?).

But if my personal experience is any hint, I would say most women in their lifetime will experience some kind of dis-ordered relationship to food.

Disordered=Dysfuctional. Disturbed. Unsettled. Imbalanced. Upset.

And unless most women do some work around their relationship to food, and live with an awareness of the cultural pressures we face, far too many of us will live our lives worried more about what size jeans we wear than what we have to offer to the world.

No freaking wonder women are depressed.

What a woman (really) wants.

My friend who has been struggling with her Eating Disorder for nearly three decades came over to my house the other night, sobbing. I knew how she felt. She was me—ten years ago. I knew how trapped she was, how alone she felt, how this addiction controlled her and how truly terrifying it feels to lose control of yourself.

I also knew that almost anything I could say to her was going to make things worse.

The oversimplifications.

The pithy compliments (“but you’re already so thin…”)

The urges to “just eat”.

A woman who is starving herself is doing so much more than trying to lose weight. She is desperate to matter in a world that has told her there is only one way to matter as a woman. She is determined to take back control of herself in a world that has taken control from her. She is doing what women have been rewarded for since the beginning of time: disappearing.

She is doing everything she knows how to do to own her body again—even if that means destroying it.

So what I did instead of giving her advice was to reach out and put my right hand firmly on her midsection—higher than her belly, but lower than her chest—and my left hand on her back in the same place. I pressed my hands toward each other, so that she could really feel the pressure.

She kept crying and crying, but I knew she knew what I meant—as abstract as it was.

What I meant was that, as women, in a world where we are told what we need to do to matter is to get thinner and thinner and thinner and smaller and smaller, we lose touch with the fact that the most beautiful thing we can do is grow fuller and richer and to feel the full weight of ourselves. The most beautiful thing we can do is to feed ourselves, literally and figuratively, to give ourselves permission to eat, to exist, to show up.

What a woman really wants is to connect with the substance of herself—her dreams, her desires, her divinity, her deep love and essence.

That’s what a woman really wants.

The great misconception of being thin.

I realize how all of this might land coming from someone who is quite naturally thin. I’m tall—5’10’’—and my weight has fluctuated between 120 and 160 for my adult life. My happiest, healthiest weight is around 130. As I write this, I’m about 128. I say all that not because it’s anyone’s business, really, but just to acknowledge the fact that, yes, I’m thin.

And here’s the great misconception about women who are thin: that we are somehow happier with ourselves and our bodies than anyone else. That we do not struggle to look in the mirror without the self-loathing thoughts and silent comments that every other woman has made to herself at some point in her life.

“Stop worrying about being fat. You are not fat. Or rather, you’re sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring or fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this.”

—Cheryl Strayed

As long as I’m obsessing about how my thighs don’t look quite like they did when I was 23, and wondering how I missed the decade-long break most people get between acne and wrinkles, I don’t have to think about what my actual role in this world really is—since that feels like a much harder question to answer. I don’t have to face my real insecurity, which is that I don’t matter unless I can find a way to win a man’s attention.

It’s all a distraction. A beautiful, brilliant distraction from what really matters—and from what a woman really wants.

What makes a woman matter?

I had a conversation with a friend the other day where I told her I worried I had wasted my life. Here I was, 33 and divorced, wanting a family but not sure if I would ever be able to have one, working hard to focus on what I do have—amazing friends, a beautiful life, a successful career, a litany of new opportunities on the horizon.

I told her that part of me looked at her life—married-with-four-kids, carpools, soccer games, that sort of thing—and wondered if maybe I was behind somehow, if I had missed my chance, wasted my time with the “wrong” men, if I had wasted my life.

She laughed. Do you know what she said to me? She said:

“Sometimes I look at your life and think the same thing!”

She told me she wondered if she had maybe had too many kids, or started too young, or given up on her dreams. She wondered if she should have spent more time focusing on her own career, and about how her 20’s were over now and there was nothing she could do to get them back. The whole conversation made us both breathe a sigh of relief.

It made me think about how short life truly is, and how the the only thing we can really ask of ourselves is to be in it with our whole hearts.

Do we really want to waste that time worrying about what size dress we wear?

Additionally, the conversation made me realize (again) the tremendous pressure there is for women to be something specific or do something specific in the world. Be thin. Be beautiful. Be a good wife and perfect mother and have the perfect family and the perfect marriage. And while you’re at it, don’t forget about your career. Climb the ladder. Win the title.

It is both ironic and tragic that we are fighting so hard to matter by doing these things when the one thing we need to do matter is the thing we most resist: to stop trying so hard and simply feel the weight of ourselves.

To exist. To eat. To feed ourselves. To show up.

“Beauty is an internal light, a spiritual radiance that all women have but which most women hide, unconsciously denying its existence. What we do not claim remains invisible… Society programs us, through the subliminal messages of popular culture, to believe that we are not truly desirable as women unless we adhere to the current standards of physical beauty…. [Yet] the woman who is truly self-aware knows that her self is a light from beyond this world, a spiritual essence that has nothing to do with the physical world.”

It isn’t until we abandon the definition of beauty and success the world has thrust upon us that we will be able to embrace the one that was given to us at birth.

This is what a woman really wants.

For the woman who has lost herself.

One of the most difficult times for me to feed myself in recent life was right after my marriage ended. I would talk myself through eating three times a day, but most days I missed the mark. This was not because I looked at myself in the mirror and thought I needed to be thinner. It was because, as hard as I tried not to go there, I wondered daily if this whole thing was my fault.

If you do not believe you deserve something—love, food, whatever—you will not allow yourself to take it, even when it’s right in front of your face.

I’ll never forget my therapist saying to me:

“The reason you are wondering if this is your fault, Ally, is because a woman’s worth in this world is measured mostly by her ability to please the people around her, so she finds herself making them happy, often at her own expense. You have been indoctrinated in this belief from a very young age…”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized she was right. For my entire life this is how I had measured my existence. Was I a good friend? Was I a good daughter? Was I a good wife? Not that there is anything wrong with being these things, but who is the measure of a good wife? Who gets to decide if a daughter is a good daughter or not?

And how dangerous is it for me to measure my worth and value and weight in the world by somebody else’s measuring stick?

A surprising number of women in our world have no idea who they are. And a big part of me wonders if this is because we’ve told them exactly who they need to be: thin, beautiful, successful, put-together, nice, sexy but not too sexy, emotional but not too emotional, a good mom, a good wife, a good daughter, a good sister… the list goes on.

It is difficult to find yourself in a world that has already decided who you are.

What powerful women do.

I have these two friends who are incredible women and are showing up in their lives 100{9ac618bfda39dd0c8c9a0232963cb9a2adfe54a7367c2d4954ad9e847b2e5305}. They are singers and songwriters and also learning the tell the story of what happened to them—a story some very powerful people would likely prefer they not tell—a story that shakes the very foundations of what our culture wants to believe about women and beauty and value.

Anytime you start to shake foundations, people get nervous.

What will we all hold onto when this whole thing comes crashing down?

But despite the fact that this is a difficult story to tell, they’re doing it.

They’re doing it without any spirit of meanness or vindictiveness. They’re not trying to get what’s “owed to them”. They’re just giving themselves permission to show up in the world. To use their voices. To become themselves and to release other women to do the same. They’re leading away for all of us.

They’re doing it boldly and bravely.

They’re doing it slowly and intentionally, but also with conviction. They’re doing it without knowing exactly how the whole thing is going to turn out. They’re just choosing to step into the beauty of their own story. They’re afraid sometimes, but but they’re doing it afraid. They’re not measuring success by what someone else says about them, but by whether or not they were able to be in this world with their whole hearts.

What would it look like for you to show up in your life like this?

What would it look like for me to show up in mine?

What if women all over the world made the choice to shop playing so small, playing by the rules someone else set for us and to become ourselves? What if stopped trying to be so nice all the time?

What if we stopped starving ourselves and started really growing into ourselves?

Post navigation

11 thoughts on “Body Shaming, Being “Fat” and What A Woman Really Wants”

One of my mantras to my grandchildren is to whisper in their ear “I love you, forever and ever, no matter what”. And I mean it.

But what is even more important is that I make an effort at some regular interval or when the situation will benefit from it to remind them “Jesus loves you, forever and ever, no matter what”.

The comparison game is a killer, literally and emotionally. If one can honestly hold tightly to the fact that we are made in God’s “image” and that He cares for us no matter what, and we train ourselves to avoid or ignore the negative, nihilist messages that we are marinated in, one can have an honest sense of contentment and joy.

It’s not a made up feeling, it comes from deep within you if you will allow it.

I love all of you, forever and ever, no matter what. And again, thank you Allison for your writing.

Allison….the day I saw Janice Dickenson ( and don’t get me started on that woman) call a size eight a plus size model was the last time I watched America’s Next Top Model. I’ve never been even a size eight shoe.

What happens if we find out that the plus sized of the world are they way we are SUPPOSED to be as a species. Wouldn’t that blow everything out of the water….

Allison, your beautiful article resonates personally for me as I reflect on the years I was trapped in my own eating hell. Having self-recovered from bulimia and recreated my relationship with food, eating, and my body, it is my mission, passion, and calling to help women do the same. I see the prison that women live in every day and it troubles me deeply. Food is survival; our bodies, the vessel that carries us through the world; it houses and protects our soul, yet we torture it, starve it. We must stop the madness! Thanks, Allison!

So true, Kelli. The fact that food is our very sustenance adds an interesting dynamic to this whole conversation. I once heard someone say that an alcoholic has to go into the cave and slay the dragon, whereas a food addict (anorexic) has to go into the cave and pet the dragon three times each day.

It’s a good mission you’re on. And we lead the way by doing our own work. Keep it up.

Your therapist hit the nail on the head. Women are judged by an unfair standard. We are expected to sacrifice everything for others and heaven forbid we should have the nerve to want or expect things for ourselves. When a man does this he’s lauded for “taking charge,” while women who do the same are vilified. For many years I allowed myself to be suckered into this ridiculous thinking, while I was raised by a feminist mother who tried to teach me better. Some of it stuck, but it took me until now to have the courage to say I want this or that for myself and the heck with what society thinks. While I aim to eat healthy most of the time so my body can function at it’s best, I refuse to never eat another delicious French Pastry just because society thinks I’m “too fat” to do so. I refuse to not share my opinions because someone else may not agree with me. I refuse to color my fabulous gray hair just to “look younger.” I present myself to the world on my terms and I’ll stand by any woman who wants to do the same.

I was thinking this morning… Is it odd that at almost age 44 I feel as though I am beginning to know who I am? While I do think that media can play a large role in defining who we are, we cannot blame it or become victims of it because in the end we are responsible for our own choices. This taking responsibility for ourselves is a necessary step in becoming a human that we accept and love no matter what imperfections arise.

Such a great point, Thia. When I think of a powerful woman, that’s exactly what I think of—someone who takes responsibility for how she feels about herself and the world, who creates her own definition of herself, despite everyone and everything trying to define her.

My father’s affirming voice was absent in my life. Therefore I looked for approval and affirmation in food instead. Oh yeah, it comforted me right up to 132 extra pounds. Finding balance and being a confident woman is difficult and delicate. We need big grace to be who God has called us to be. Overcomers, that’s who.